Final Fantasy Tactics: he other side of the Fantasy

Final Fantasy Tactics

The Lion War, a remade version
of the game that actually
took a large step from
the Original game. Which is good.

This game is one of my favorite games ever. I know I know. I said that about Batman but this one is pretty schway, as well. Final Fantasy Tactics is a Playstation Title that was then remade on the psp (and soon to be iphone) game. Personally, I really enjoyed the PSP remake because it had more to do and the cleaned up the improper grammar of the first one and made it into Old English. So "Ye"s and "Sire"s stuff like straight from a Shakespearean play in addition to cut scenes done in what appears to be beautiful Water Color.

I haven't really mentioned this yet, but this is a turn based Strategy game.

Story


Basically this story is full of so many twists and turns, you will thinking you are watching an M Night Shyamalan movie. Well besides that fact it is good and presented in a nice, occasionally cinematic way. Unlike a M. Night Shyamalan movie. As said before, the cutscenes are done in beautiful hand drawn art and fully animated, but only in the PSP (and assuming the iphone) version(s). So is it will be worth it to get one of these two versions. If you are playing the playstation version fret not, they still act out the all the scenes with in game graphics. No Voice actors or old english though. Sorry. They also fix a number of translation problems the Original game had. Which is huge because it helps the story flow better.

Gameplay


If you are not into turn based gameplay do not play this. If you don't know if you rather or not you like turn based combat, but like managing parties and upgrading your units play this. If you LOVE the Final Fantasy Universe and enjoy all of the previous things I said, Why the hell haven't you played this yet and what are you waiting for?

Hope you don't mind seeing this screen

In this game, you spend a lot of time in the menu window leveling up your parties (or the characters you use the most) skills. You do this for the obvious reason of making your characters stronger and have better skills. after you master a skill by putting points into it, you may use said skill. You earn points by winning battles. There are also several different jobs to choose from which makes this game super interesting just due to the sheer number of different parties you can have. There is also different stats to look at each character before choosing a job for them. Some of these stats are rather they are Male or Female (females are generally better at magic where as males are better melee attackers and meat shields)

Now here comes a kicker, when in battle, if a character dies, you have 3 turns to revive them otherwise that character dies. This means bye bye for said character and their equipment. This can really suck because you will lose a character or two (maybe more) your first play through or until you master the game mechanics. I mean you can go back to the last save point if you would like but where's the fun in that?

In battle it is like any other turn based role playing strategy, move character certain amount of squares they can move, approach enemy, if you are on the side or behind the enemy you have a better chance of hitting, etc etc.

Another cool thing is this game are all the secrets. When you first start the game you only have two jobs to start with. As you level up these classes they unlock other classes. Which in turn, different combinations of job levels will give you even better jobs. On top of a great class system there is also some hidden characters (like Cloud from FFVII for instance) and a ton of items to boot.

The boss battles are simply epic and the only time I really lost characters. When you have a boss down to it's last 5,000 health and it was over 20,000 you tend to know when to cut your losses and keep fighting without them. Mind you that you could have someone just share a phoenix down and revive or use one of the many other ways to revive but...never mind, you will understand if you play!

Overall

The cutscenes are so nice in the Remake.

This is a turn based strategy game. If you have not picked up on this fact yet, you are stupid and I cannot help you. With that being said, it is a game that is a lot of fun despite not having a lot of graphics behind it. If you can, get the Lion War Version of this game because it is like 20x better due to the fixes and cutscenes. The gameplay is rather solid and is TURN-BASED, so some battles do tend to drag on sometimes so hopefully you have some time to sit down and play this amazing game.

If you enjoy Turn Based Games then I give this a 9.2 out of 10


If you HATE Turn Based Strategy games, you will not like this game and it will be more of a 0-5.9 out of 10


Regh out.